Modeling and control of fully actuated vector thrust unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper studies the modeling and control of a class of fully actuated, thrust vectoring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for aerial locomotion and manipulation. In this paper, we develop a novel fully actuated vector thrust UAV with all propellers able to tilt about two perpendicular axes, so that the thrust force generated by each propeller is a fully controllable vector in 3D space. The dynamic model of a UAV with arbitrary number of such vectorized propellers is constructed, and the control algorithm for position/orientation tracking is developed to generate the desired 6-dimensional body force wrench. To resolve the redundancy in actuation, a thrust force optimization problem minimizing power consumption while achieving the desired body force wrench is formulated. The optimization problem has the thrust vectors as variables, and is shown to be convex with linear equality constraints, so that the global minima can be easily derived. Various simulation results are presented to verify the proposed solution.